What Ukraine's first Bayraktar strikes meant for Donbas

What did it mean when Ukraine used a Turkish-made drone against separatist forces for the first time? On 28 October 2021, the question was still being weighed in Kyiv, Moscow and the occupied parts of Donbas, after a sequence of events that began on 26 October.

The first strikes

On 26 October 2021, Ukraine confirmed that it had carried out its first drone strikes with the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2. According to the report at the time, the drone destroyed a pro-Russian separatist D-30 howitzer. The same day, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and another wounded by rebel artillery near Hranitne in Donetsk Oblast.

Moscow's reaction

On 27 October 2021, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that the delivery of the Bayraktar TB2 and its first operational use by Ukraine in Donbas might "destabilize the situation" in the region. His remarks came a day after the first strikes against separatist forces.

Movement in the grey zone

Also on 27 October 2021, Natalya Nikonorova, foreign minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, said that Ukrainian troops had regained control of the village of Staromaryivka in the so-called grey zone between Ukraine and the separatist-held area. That account came from the separatist side.

Why it mattered

Taken together, the reports from 26 and 27 October 2021 describe a new weapon entering the conflict, a fatal exchange of artillery fire near Hranitne, and a Russian warning about the drone's use. They also describe a claim of shifting control over a village in the buffer area. The drone was a type of system that, by 2019, a number of countries, Ukraine among them, were listed as operating in armed forms.

By 28 October 2021, therefore, the Bayraktar had moved from a delivery to a weapon used in combat, and Moscow had publicly objected to it.